Create an Android Development Environment

Create an Android Virtual Device (AVD)

Creating an Android Virtual Device (AVD) is a relatively quick step. From the menu bar, select Tools>Manage AVDs (you can also go run the AVD Manager directly from the SDK folder). You’ll see the Android Virtual Device Manager screen. The list of AVDs will be empty, so click the New button to bring up the Create new Android Virtual Device wizard.

Fill out the resulting wizard as shown in Figure 11. You need only fill in the name, the target (select the Android 2.2 target) and give it a 32MB SD Card (that allows you to load a lot of programs on there during testing). That should be all you need. Click Create AVD and you’ll see the result shown in Figure 12.

Last Step – Configuring Eclipse

You’ve successfully downloaded all the components of the development environment! The last thing needed is to configure Eclipse. The Android development site has an excellent page on this, so I won’t duplicate it. Just start up your Eclipse IDE; you should still see the Welcome screen. Close the Welcome page and then follow the instructions entitled “Downloading the ADT Plugin” in the middle of the page. Once that’s done, Eclipse will want to restart. Let it.

After restart, you’ll see the Welcome to Android Development dialog. Enter the values as shown in Figure 13 and click Finish. You’re done! (Note that you will not have to execute the section entitled Configuring the ADT Plugin; that’s done by this dialog.) In our first application article on the topic, we’ll create the forerunner of a real business application. If you don’t want to wait for that, you can get started by following the Hello World tutorial.

IBM Systems Magazine is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. The editorial content of IBM Systems Magazine is placed on this website by MSP TechMedia under license from International Business Machines Corporation.